Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami

I was introduced to Murakami by a twitter friend and a fellow book blogger. Norwegian Wood was my first book by Murakami that I had read. I still remember, I was on my way to Jaipur and the book didn’t let me sleep throughout overnight train journey. I kept reading it and kept thinking about what I was reading. The characters, the narration and the thoughts that the book invoked in my brain. No other book had this effect on me previously and that’s when I understood why people love Haruki Murakami like that. His words has immense power to shake you from within and relate to his characters some or the other way. Though, post Norwegian Wood I never read any book by Murakami but now that I have read his latest book, I am definitely going to read the others very soon.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the story about 36 year old Tsukuru Tazaki. A good looking Japanese who is an engineer who builds railroad stations and lives in Tokyo. He belongs to the Nagoya city where he had spent most of his childhood and had a group of friends. His friends, Kei Akamatsu (Aka) , Yoshio Oumi (Ao) , Yuzuki Shirane (Shiro) , Eri Kurono (Kuro) had a group and they were really close to each other, let’s just say, they lived for each other. Childhood was fun and time flew. When it came to choosing their career paths, Tsukuru chose to study in Tokyo and left Nagoya city while the rest of his group stayed back in Nagoya.

Tsukuru kept coming back to Nagoya whenever he could but slowly things changed and their group started fading away and suddenly one day, Ao called Tsukuru to tell him to never try to contact the rest of the group. Their friendship was over. The incident took toll on Tsukuru and somehow his live moved on. After 16 years, Sara, Tsukuru’s love interest forces him to go back to his friends and find out the reason behind his friends abandoning him all of a sudden and Tsukuru does the same.

From the very first page, a reader would empathise with Tsukuru. The power of Murakami’s words would force you to do so and the story just flows. However, somewhere in between, it gets really tough to turn the pages as the book got a tad too philosophical for my taste but it was the story that made me sail through it and towards the end, I was happy with what I had read. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a book that you would want to devour on over the weekend. Read some pages, ponder on them and then read some more. Give it a shot.